Finding that broken feeling took a while, but when it came, just before midnight on the Louisiana set of “I Saw the Light,” Tom Hiddleston’s voice crawled into Hank Williams’ words as the blues played out slow and mournful to the hushed tune of a single guitar.

Hiddleston’s rendition of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” comes toward the end of writer-director Marc Abraham’s biopic, which opens Friday. A troubled man and a music legend, Williams, who died at 29 in 1953 after recording 30 Top 10 country music hits, left an indelible mark on American culture. Hiddleston, a British actor best known for his villain Loki in Marvel movies, said he felt the sting of torment and the weight of legacy in each song.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” said Hiddleston, who had to reinvent his inner musical rhythms and raise the pitch of his baritone to embody Williams’ tenor. “The moment I signed on I understood my duty to him and his family. You’ve got no choice but to throw your whole soul at it.”

Hiddleston traveled to Nashville and was coached by Rodney Crowell, a Grammy-winning country musician who introduced the actor not only to Williams’ music but to the work of bluesmen such as Jimmy Reed and Howlin’ Wolf. The two worked on blues chord progressions and how to get Hiddleston, whose British training had made him metronomically precise, to give the music air by hanging back slightly off the beat.

“Rodney used to say, ‘We’re shaking the Englishman out of you,'” said Hiddleston, who recalled their collaboration the other day as a white patio curtain lifted in the breeze and the faint sound of traffic drifted in from the Hollywood Hills. “I couldn’t have made it without Rodney. I needed a guide through the woods.”

Williams’ up-tempo songs, like “Hey, Good Lookin’,” and “Honky Tonkin’,” vibrated with coy fun and desire. But it was sparse and poetic ballads that earned Williams, who suffered back pain and was addicted to alcohol and drugs, the nickname “Hillbilly Shakespeare.” His voice could sound as if it had been through a storm; a bit of hurt pressing against the dawn with Alabama-inflected syllables that could curl a note back into a phrase or vanish.

In the years before his death, Williams, a former shipyard worker, seemed a man recounting defeats and laying bare his demons in a potent and beguiling mix of masculinity, stoicism and vulnerability. That raw plaintiveness transcended country music and inspired singers and songwriters including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Tony Bennett, Norah Jones and Bruce Springsteen, who once said he wanted to crack Williams’ musical code to understand its “beautiful simplicity and its darkness and depth.”

In the film, Hiddleston as Williams, well into a night of boozing, explains to a writer the mood he evokes in songs such as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”: “Everybody has a little darkness in ’em,” he says. “Now, they may not like it. Don’t wanna know about it. But it’s there. … I’m talking about things like anger, misery, sorrow, shame, and they hear it. I show it to ’em. And they don’t have to take it home.”

Much of Williams’ singularity and heartbreak resonated in his voice, which could shift from somber to what Crowell called a “post-vaudeville yodel” that tested singers who tried to emulate him.

“Credit has to go to Tom’s work ethic. He’s a dedicated artist,” Crowell said of the 35-year-old Hiddleston. “Hank Williams was a yodeler and a blues singer, which is basically from the knees down and the neck up. Tom had to get hold of the mechanics of projecting his voice as a yodeler does. He had to break out of the trained Shakespeare actor chest voice and into the yodel. It’s a very difficult thing to master.”

The yodel warbled through “Lovesick Blues,” a song Crowell said was “a job for anybody.” Hiddleston did 62 takes of it in one day, which the actor said “felt like swimming in the ocean through seaweed and finally I was in clear water.” But the melancholy in “Your Cheatin’ Heart” was tough to personify. Hiddleston lived with the song for months but the magic didn’t arrive until late on a cold Friday night in Shreveport, La., after a long week of shooting.

“My voice sounded good and technically it was pleasing, but Rodney said he couldn’t hear the pain in it,” Hiddleston said. “He kept re-stating that it needed to be more painful, more aching, more mournful, more yearning.”

While the crew was setting up the shot, Hiddleston walked into a backyard. “The challenge of it was very solitary,” he said, “and I just went back inside and did it.”

Hiddleston did two takes with Crowell playing guitar off camera. The scene captured a man’s pain over a love lost and was an eerie glimpse at a life in spiral. After the last note was struck, Hiddleston, slipping into a Southern accent, remembered Crowell saying: “That’s it right there. You ain’t going to do no more. I’m going back to my hotel.”

“Tom put his butt on the line,” said Crowell, adding that he wanted to do the song live on the set to distill its intimacy. When Williams recorded it in 1952 he was months away from death. “It was one of the most beautiful performances Williams ever did. We had to capture the poignancy of that moment.”

Williams was rough, brash and unadorned. His early death, like those of other musicians including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, left behind astonishing work and endless conjecture at what might have come with age. Williams wore his flaws in public, showing up drunk at performances and forcing the Grand Ole Opry, the pinnacle he aspired to for years, to drop him. He died of heart failure in the back seat of his Cadillac on his way to a New Year’s Day concert in Canton, Ohio.

“Hank was one of those people who lived without a safety net,” Hiddleston said. “They make compelling artists because they stand at the edge of a cliff and look down and are unafraid of the fall. That’s why they’re so captivating. But I do have that safety catch. The difference between me and him is I will step back.”

The light before a good sunset in Tennessee changes from fiery pink to a flood of gold until the sky eventually turns a dark enough purple to be lit by a falling star — just as Hank Williams wrote it. In September of 2014, the summer heat had eased up enough to enjoy the outdoors at dusk and those same colors began to fill the sky as Tom Hiddleston was finishing a run along the hillsides south of Nashville. In under 40 days, filming for the Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light would begin in Shreveport, Louisiana, and the British-born actor had just arrived in Nashville to start the process of learning to sing, talk and look like the country music legend.

Becoming Hank Williams seems like a dubious fantasy as the tall, athletic Hiddleston sits down to talk after a run. His life is a far cry from Williams, who was plagued by poor health. Also, at 33, he’s already four years older than the singer was at the time of his death. Still, he looks the perfect movie star age. . . which, of course, is no age at all.

Hiddleston, who won the Laurence Oliver Award for his mastery of Shakespeare, has been criticized for taking on the role of the Hillbilly Shakespeare — a moniker given to Williams in praise of his lyricism. A peer of Williams once described the singer’s tendency for self-sabotage as him being unable to take one step forward without shooting himself in the foot, and as I find myself blankly staring at Hiddleston’s running shoes, I conclude that he has a lot of work to do to become a mess.

USA Today has a new interview with Tom, and a new photoshoot (via Torrilla). Click the photos for the photoshoot and read the article below.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – To date, a few viral karaoke videos have been the most the world has heard Tom Hiddleston sing.

That will change Friday, when Hiddleston, 35, makes his debut in the Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light, in which he impressively adopts the country legend’s distinct warble. He laughs. “I apologize unreservedly” for those, the British actor says on a warm day in Los Angeles. Professionally, “I haven’t really sang before,” he says. “I mean I was in musicals (in school), but I was always a singing actor. I was never in a band, I was never in the choir or anything like that.”

I Saw the Light is full of tumult, genius and pain, chronicling the country legend’s six years in infamy as Williams charted 33 hit singles, until he died abruptly at the age of 29 in the backseat of a Cadillac in 1953.

“I thought about this a lot,” says Hiddleston. “You think of all of those people who burned twice as bright but not for long, like Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse and James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix. There’s a club, what do they call it, the 27 club or something? Heath Ledger was 27.”

He continues: “They become canonized, because they lived at a pitch of such intensity just before the lights went out. And they become frozen in time, so there is never a moment where you see the maturation of their talent or their personality. In some respects, it’s basically a tragedy because you don’t know where they would have gone or how they would have developed.”

More than 60 years have passed since Williams’ death, and classics like Your Cheatin’ Heart, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry and Cold, Cold Heart still play on the radio.

I Saw the Light, which received shaky reviews at its debut at the Toronto Film Festival, despite applause for Hiddleston’s performance, charts the genesis of those songs, while folding in Williams’ tumultuous marriage to Audrey Williams (Elizabeth Olsen), his unreliability and the ultimately fatal mix of alcohol and drugs he used in part to control chronic pain caused by spina bifida.

Hiddleston, who has become beloved to Marvel fans worldwide as the impish god Loki, embedded himself in Nashville for five weeks to get Williams right.

“There were some dark days where I just wasn’t sure if I was going to get it,” he admits. “There was a moment where I canceled everything. I canceled my life, I didn’t pick up the phone, I didn’t do anything else but what was related to Hank.”

“He puts a lot of pressure on himself with everything he does,” says Olsen, adding that Hiddleston took on responsibility to do right by Williams’ legacy and family.

Skill-wise, director Marc Abraham calls Hiddleston “so facile it’s infuriating.” That means on-set instead of staying in character, the actor easily switched between dialects. “Let’s put it this way: When we would have a disagreement about how something was coming down, he reverted to the king’s English,” the director laughs.

Now, despite big-budget films such asThor: Ragnarok and Kong: Skull Island in the wings, it’s Williams who stayed with Hiddleston. “Looking back at it, it was one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done,” he says.

New interview with Tom, Marc Abraham and Elizabeth Olsen. Video is after the cut, since its autoplay.

When casting his Hank Williams biopic “I Saw the Light” (out Friday in Nashville, New York and Los Angeles, with a nationwide release slated for April 1), writer and director Marc Abraham found his leading man across the pond.

Playing Williams — a music legend dubbed the Hillbilly Shakespeare for the plainspoken pathos of compositions such as “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Men with Broken Hearts” and “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You”— is London-born Tom Hiddleston, a Royal Academy of Dramatic Art alum who got his start on the stage in Shakespeare works such as “Othello” and “Cymbeline.”

None of his previous roles prepared Hiddleston, best known for his turn as the villain Loki in “The Avengers,” to play Williams, one of the pillars of 20th-century music.

“I’ve never worked harder on anything in my life,” he said. “I needed to look like Hank, to sound like Hank, and to represent his struggles and celebrate his talent, but … I needed someone to show me the way.”

Set at the dawn of time, when prehistoric creatures and woolly mammoths roamed the earth, Early Man tells the story of Dug, along with sidekick Hognob as they unite his tribe against a mighty enemy Lord Nooth and his Bronze Age City to save their home.

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